Laura Vanderkam: Working on vacation - so what?

7:11 PM,
Aug. 19, 2013

Laura Vanderkam

Written by

Laura
Vanderkam

My husband and I and some old friends have gathered for the week at a beach house on the Jersey Shore. It's a typical summer evening. We've gotten the kids down. We have our beers and four laptops open in front of us, as we type merrily away.

It's a common scene, apparently. A new survey from Pertino, a cloud networking company, finds that 59 percent of Americans regularly do some work on vacation. It's the sort of statistic that inspires hand-wringing about nervous workers, and maybe some sneering from Europeans whose out-of-office emails report they'll be gone from July 20 to Aug. 30.